The day after a November 9 “Day of Action” on which police arrested seven Occupy activists, the atmosphere was tense. A video of police armed with batons and riot gear beating students had gone viral. This prompted a now infamous press release from the administration, calling the actions of the student protesters (“linking arms and forming a human chain”) “not non-violent civil disobedience.”
The incident would later be rehashed on national news, The Colbert Report, and elsewhere. Former U.S. Poet Laureate and Berkeley professor Robert Hass wrote a moving op-ed for The New York Times. For more details on the whole saga, The Daily Californian has since put together a great post aggregating their coverage.
At the time of the November 9 protests, then-Chancellor Robert Birgeneau was traveling in Asia. He later claimed to be in “limited contact” with campus officials while the police were drawing their batons. The ACLU submitted a Freedom of Information Act request, and learned a couple months later that Birgeneau had in fact lied. Birgeneau “was told that campus police had used batons, and … he did not call for a more passive approach” in dealing with the protestors, the majority of whom were students.